Commercial Open Source Software

The Dutch government is showing the way to go: the Minister for Foreigng Trade Frank Heemskerk opened the now famous ODF Plugfest saying that a joint course of action for developing effective ODF support in each other’s products is needed.

Last week the Italian government announced a joint effort with Sun Microsystems to foster the use of StarOffice by local public administrations, but the press release doesn’t mention either ODF or open standards. Improvements are needed, the lack of a European coherent strategic vision towards standards’ compliance.

Continue reading ‘An ODF Plugfest a Day Take the Doctor Away’

Rajiv Shah and Jay Kesan wrote the paper “running code as part of an open standards policy” arguing that the “running code” requirement - i.e. multiple independent, interoperable implementations of an open standard - should be part of governments’ open standards policies.

Last week the Dutch government hosted the first ODF plugfest: creators, implementors and end-users met up to improve OpenDocument interoperability for real, and it worked out well.

Continue reading ‘ODF Interoperability: Rough Consensus and Running Code’

The Italian OpenOffice.org Association (PLIO), welcomes the fact that  Microsoft Office 2007  now natively support the Open Document Format, the file format for electronic office documents originally developed by Sun within OpenOffice.org and now ISO standard.

The association one year ago welcomed Microsoft’s decision to support ODF.

Continue reading ‘OpenOffice.org Italian Association Welcomes Microsoft ODF Natively Support’

Free Software Foundation Europe one year ago introduced the Document Freedom Day, and also this year a global day for document liberation is scheduled for 25 of March.

The initiative promotes only ODF, other open standards, like the Portable Document Format (PDF), are ignored.

Continue reading ‘Open Standards: Document ‘Freedom’ Day is back, some thoughts’

Today the OMAT conference hosted the “Standards and Interoperability“ session, and for the second time this year Adobe, Microsoft and the Italian OpenOffice.org community were discussing about interoperability and conformance.

The first OMAT conference was held just when Microsoft was enjoying OpenXML approval, while today they publicly announced the decision to join the OIC TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance technical committee.

The Italian OpenOffice.org community already welcomed Microsoft’s decision to support ODF. Now that they decided to join the OIC TC accepting Rob Weir invitation, we are looking forward to see IBM and Microsoft cooperate for a real interoperability.

Technorati Tags: open standards, OMAT, RobWeir, OIC TC, OASIS, PLIO, ODF, OpenOffice

Sun along with IBM announced the availability of  the ODF Validator - a tool that validates files against  ODF ISO/IEC 26300, ODF v.1.1 and ODF v1.2 - as part of a broader initiative that goes under the name of ODF Toolkit Union.

The ODF Toolkit Union,  a new open-source software community project namely aimed at making document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business. At the present stage are available for downloads two SDKs, two tools for processing ODF documents and a conformance tool.

Declarations of conformity to open standards are a self-certification processes, and tools like the ODF Validator (available also in source code form) can help users and consumers to make better informed choices, at least. Public administrations choosing products that are implementing different “flavours” of a standard, can drammatically affect interoperability. That’s why public administrations should ask Standard Setting Organizations to make conformance testing part of the standardization process.

Getting back to the ODF Toolkit Union, as a matter of fact two members don’t make a union. Actually not even the IBM Press room mention the news, despite Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, gave the announcement at the OOo Conf 2008 in Beijing, spreading also the word about how good is Symphony.

Will the club welcome other vendors?

Technorati Tags: ODF Validator, ODF, ODF Toolkit Union,  MichaelKarasick

Now in Malaga is taking place the Open Source World Conference - an international gathering that after five editions is beginning to be considered as a must within the sector.

This afternoon within the open formats session I was supposed to give a speech on standards compliance and the role of European public administrations, a paper accepted by the OSWC Technical Committee. Unfortunately I had to suddenly cancel my trip, so I wish to share some excerpts from the paper.

The meaning of understanding and the importance of open formats. The relationship between information and its representation are not well known, people often think that digital data and the information they represent are (almost) one and the same thing.There is no full awareness that, as well as in order to understand a text written in an ancient language one must first decodify it. At the same extent to use a digitalized information one must first decodify it.

We get some help in fully understanding the issue from Hofstadter, who suggests to distinguish three different levels in a “message”, according to the following definitions: “framework message”, is the message itself, and it is implicitly transmitted by the global exterior aspect of the “information carrier”. Understanding it means understanding the need of a decodification mechanism “external message”, is the information implicitly carried by the configuration of symbols and structures of the message, telling us how to decodify the internal message.Understanding it means being able to build up a proper decodification mechanism of the internal message; “internal message”, is the familiar one, the message that the sender wanted to send us.

In our context the frame work message may be exemplified by a CD carrying a file name “Beethoven Ninth.mp3”. The external message in this case might be made out of the informations that it is possible to obtain by reverse engeneering techniques from the study of other documents expressed in that same digital format. The internal message might consist of the sensations induced by the reproduced execution of the music.The “mechanism” allowing for the possibility to extract the internal message, that is the “information detector“, may be a computer carrying a given software, or any other apparatus (like a music player), but what one really needs is that the implicit information contained in the external message be made explicit by proper and detailed specifications of the format, expressed in natural language and/or by generative grammars or equivalent formalisms.Once the availability of the informations needed to build an information detector has been granted, the internal message will be freely received and understood (in this context it would not be appropriate to try further clarifications of such a naturally subjective and individual notion as that of “understanding”).

What is indeed important for the user is the possibility to detect and extract the information contained in the digital data, expressed in a given format. In order to ensure such possibility, we need open standards.

Today declarations of conformity to a file format standard is a self-certification process. In Europe the CE marking is a mandatory conformity mark on many product groups to indicate conformity with the essential health and safety requirements set out in European Directives. In short while vendors need a CE mark to sell a plug or a toy, software can be sold without any external test house which evaluates the product and its documentation. Since there is no organization that assess standards compliance, users and customers can just rely on implementors’ statements of compliance. This is definitely an open issue on open standards, and Public Administrations can play an important role, participating to Standard Setting Organizations works, as well as influencing the European market. 

It is common to think of standardization as the process of standards creation, but this view excludes those who implement the standard, those who use the implementations of the standard and what happens when standards evolve or get obsolete.As a matter of fact today every IT vendor can tell its products are compliant to a specific open standard, but it doesn’t need to proof it. If European Public Administrations won’t take part in the process to certify standards’ compliance we can easily end up buying and acquiring products that are implementing a different version of a standard, eventually affecting interoperability and communications.

Tomorrow’s data availability depends upon today’s data format.

Technorati Tags: open standards, Open Source World Conference, OSWC, Standards Organizations

The government of India is welcoming public feedback on the draft document of a Policy on Open standards for e-Governance, until the 21th November.

In order to ensure Interoperability among e-governance applications, Government of India has setup an Institutional mechanism for formulation of Standards through collaborative efforts of stakeholders through
the e-Governance Standards portal.

Technorati Tags: India, open standards, e-gov

After the dispute about European definition of open standards happened after the release of the new version of the European Interoperability Framework, recently has been available the draft document on the basis of which the final EIF v2.0 will be elaborated.

A summary of reactions - to be sent at eifv2@ec.europa.eu by 22 September 2008 at the latest- will be published on the IDABC website and will constitute another input into the EIF elaboration.

Read the full article.

Profoss last week organised an event on OpenOffice.org deployments in professional environments.

Running with the seagulls, by * Toshio *

The event was opened by Roberto Galoppini, who talked about the approach and methodology available for a successful OpenOffice.org migration. After an introduction to the OpenOffice.org community and the way OpenOffice.org has been promoted in Italy, with significant results (doubling of download year over year), Roberto went ahead with advices on OpenOffice.org migrations, based on his own experience. I won’t make a recap of this talk here, but as often, the most obvious points are those that are worth repeating: involve your users, evaluate the situation before migrating, etc. Worth noting is that integration of OpenOffice.org with other enterprise systems might cause troubles at some point. Maybe a repository of approved or certified OpenOffice.org extensions might be helping here, but Roberto doesn’t see a global initiative happening soon, or unrelated to commercial interests of a company.

Next was Eric Descamps, project manager at the Belgian Post for the pilot on OpenOffice.org. After evaluation of the business case of an OOo deployment at the Belgian Post, it was discovered that the returns were more or less the same if the deployment started in a window between now and in 2 years. As a result, the project is now frozen, but can be restarted anytime. I guess this is a good argument when negociating with Microsoft. Let’s hope it won’t be limited at that though. Because the pilot at the Post brought interesting information. As an example, most problems encountered by users where due to format conversions. And this is in agreement with Roberto, who advised to switch to ODF altogether when switching to OOo.

During the break, Bruno Lowagie, from iText fame, gave a demo combining iText and OOo for the generation of PDF documents: the template bring edited in OOo, and the final document generated by iText.

After the break, it was Machtelt Garrels‘ turn to talk. Machtelt is the co-founder of the Belgian chapter of the OpenDoc Society, and gave a passioned talk about avoiding the common pitfalls during a migration. As mentioned above, it’s funny to see the most obvious things be worth repeating. One such thing is that management has to give the example. How can an employee be motivated by a change to OOo if his own managers don’t take the step themselves?

Her talk was followed by a panel discussion where all speakers participated.

This panel discussion closed the third Profoss event, which was again highly rated by all participants.

Profoss was started one year ago to provide quality information about the use of free and open source software in professional environments. Open source technologies are still too often dismissed as unreliable, unsupported geek toys. This is a judgment generally based on unverified allegations or due to ignorance of the open source world. Profoss wants professionals to take their decision to use or reject open source technologies on hard facts.

To reach that goal, Profoss’ first initiative was to organise events bringing non-commercial, informative content.
This was followed by other initiatives like a news website, directories of software and professionals specialised in open source and a planet aggregating feeds from blogs talking about professional open source at planet.profoss.eu.

If you want to be updated about Profoss activities, you can join the newsletter.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, openoffice, Profoss, RobertoGaloppini, EricDescamps, BrunoLowagie, MachteltGarrels